A Mumbai court has issued a non-bailable arrest warrant against Sundararaman. K, a former head of ad sales for Google (NSDQ: GOOG) India, in a criminal defamation case pertaining to content on some blogs hosted on Blogger.com, a Google service. The petitioner is Business World senior associate editor Gurbir Singh. The court issued the warrant after the defendant failed to be present in the court, said advocate M. Unnikrishnan, who is representing Singh in the case. Sundararaman is currently vice-president, sales and marketing, at Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) Essar Cellular Ltd and is based out of Chennai.
The Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate S.M.Chintanbalekar of the Esplanade Court, Mumbai, issued the warrant on Monday.
Singh had launched civil proceedings against Google India in the Mumbai High Court in 2007 and subsequently also launched criminal proceedings against Sundararaman as a representative of the company. The Hindu journalist Oommen Ninan is another defendant.
The blogs that are the subject of the law suits include warfornews.blogspot.com, mediamamu.blogspot.com and mediamalice.blogspot.com.
In the civil proceeding, the Bombay High Court had granted a permanent injunction against Google India, directing the company to remove the offending blogs from its web pages, said Singh. “The court had also directed Google to reveal the identity of the publishers, but the company has not done this so far,” Singh said. He is seeking Rs10 lakh as damages from Google India.
Google India, however, said it was not aware of the court case. “We are not aware of this court case but the blog in question has been removed following a past court order. The said person Sundararaman K is no longer employed with Google India,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
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